Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream

Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007, Libri)

I read a lot of feminist writings in the 1970s, and was often struck by how they opened up novel and (for me) surprising views on subjects that I didn't expect to learn much new or surprising on. I haven't read many feminist writings since then, probably because the insights seemed to grow stale and formulaic. One exception was Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. This is another. It's actually two books: one reviews a long list of "captivity narratives" -- memoirs, accounts, and mythicized novels of white American women kidnapped by Indians, whose presence and alienness was at least as terrifying for early Americans as anything the islamofascists might fantasize; the other is an account of what happened after 9/11, focusing on the reflexive return of sexual role-playing, a world of trembling "security moms" and studly politicians offering themselves as protective heroes. Not that it's exactly lived up to the myth.

(pp. 6-7):

Several weeks after the [9/11] attacks, the Bush administration called on Hollywood directly to help "communicate" -- or rather, market -- the new war on terror to the American people. Entertainment moguls were twice summoned to the White House and, on the two-month anniversary of 9/11, Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, invited more than forty of the top movie and television executives to a five-star Beverly Hills hotel to lodge a personal appeal (complete with a PowerPoint presentation offering bullet items like "This is a war against evil"). In mid-December 2001, the entertainment industry unveiled its first response on more than ten thousand movie screens -- a quarter of all American cinemas -- and in classrooms across the country. The Spirit of America, a rapid-fire movie montage, celebrated American screen heroes whom the film's director, Chuck Workman, defined as "reluctant but defiant revenge takers," cowboy-code-of-honor types who never throw the first punch but are relentless and invincible once riled. Workman was an old hand at the greatest-moments genre (his previous credits included the annual Oscar entertainment pastiche; Playboy: Story of X, a high-speed romp through a century of porn; Stoogemania; and Fifty Years of Bugs Bunny in 3½ Minutes); he packed 110 scenes of valorous vengeance from Birth of a Nation to Shane to Dirty Harry to The Patriot into 180 seconds. Despite the space constraints, Workman felt compelled to include one of the films twice and grant it double pride of place: he bookended his homage with the opening and closing scenes of John Ford's 1956 Western classic, The Searchers. "I chose it," Workman told me, "because John Wayne is the quintessential American hero for what I was trying to say. He's a rescuer. When he rescues the girl, that's what the movie is all about. Rescue is a good word to describe what a lot of these movies are all about." The final image in The Spirit of America is of Ethan Edwards, John Wayne's character, framed by a Texan homestead door in the 1870s, a leather-faced outlaw returned from a five-year quest to snatch his niece Debbie from the clutches of Comanche savages. Edwards has succeeded: the girl returns limp, pietà-style, in his arms, the bloody scalp of her captor, Scar, firmly in his possession. This was the Duke we were so desperate to "welcome back" in the aftermath of 9/11, a stone-cold killer and Indian hater who would stand guard over our virginal girls. But why did our cultural dream life conjure into being this man -- and on that mission>? Brokers, busboys, municipal workers, and military bureaucrats, not little girls, were the victims of the terrorist attacks. Why did we perceive an assault on the urban workplace as a threat to the domestic circle? Why were we willing ourselves back onto a frontier where pigtailed damsels clutched rag dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return them to the home?

Faludi divided the book into two parts, the first "Ontogeny," the other "Phylogeny"; she explains here (p. 13):

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin's, famously held in 1866. That is, an embryo as it develops repeats in compressed form the evolutionary stages of its species: in the space of nine months, a human in utero passes from fish to reptile to mammal. Whatever the scientific value of recapitulation theory (modern biology no longer applies it literally), Haeckel's hypothesis retains a metaphorical power in the realm of cultural history. The ways that we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by. September 11 presented just such a crisis. Our cultural response to it had distinct developmental phases that seemed to have little bearing on the actual circumstances we faced; they seemed instead to retrace some hidden road map. We sped through our memory bank the way The Spirit of America whipped through a hundred years of Hollywood heroism in three minutes. Like the young man in The Searchers caught in "the terror-dream," we were involuntarily revisiting some buried experience and systematically reinterring it. But what experience? We have been here before, but when? The "unimaginable" assault on our home soil was, in fact, anything but unimaginable. The anxieties it awakened reside deep in our cultural memory. And the myth we deployed to keep those anxieties buried is one we've been constructing for more than three hundred years.

(pp. 21-22):

Within days of the attack, a number of media venues sounded the death knell of feminism. In light of the national tragedy, the women's movement had proved itself, as we were variously informed, "parochial," "frivolous," and "an unaffordable luxury" that had now "met its Waterloo." The terrorist assault had levied "a blow to feminism," or, as a headline on the op-ed page of the Houston Chronicle pithily put it, "No Place for Feminist Victims in Post 9-11 America."

"The feminist movement, already at low ebb, has slid further into irrelevancy," syndicated columnist Cathy Young asserted. "Now that the peaceful life can no longer be guaranteed," military historian Martin van Creveld declared in Newsday, "one of the principal losers is likely to be feminism, which is based partly on the false belief that the average woman is as able to defend herself as the average man." In a column titled "Hooray for Men," syndicated columnist Mona Charen anticipated the end of the old reign of feminism: "Perhaps the new climate of danger -- danger from evil men -- will quiet the anti-male agitation we've endured for so long." New York Times columnist John Tierney held out the same hope. "Since Sept. 11, the 'culture of the warrior' doesn't seem quite so bad to Americans worried about the culture of terrorism," he wrote, impugning the supposed feminist "determination to put boys in touch with their inner feelings." "American males' fascination with guns doesn't seem so misplaced now that they're attacking Al Qaeda's fortress," he sniffed. "No one is suggesting a Million Mom March on Tora Bora."

These were, of course, familiar themes, the same old nostrums marching under a bright new banner. Long before the towers fell, conservative efforts to roll back women's rights had been making inroads, and the media had been issuing periodic pronouncements on "the death of feminism." In part, what the attack on the World Trade Center did was foreground and speed up a process already under way. "Any kind of conflict at a time of unrest in society typically accentuates the fault lines that already exist," Geeta Rao Gupta, president of the International Center for Research on Women told the Christian Science Monitor in a story headlined "Are Women Being Relegated to Old Roles?," one of the few articles to acknowledge what was happening. The seismic jolt of September 11 elevated to new legitimacy the ventings of longtime conservative antifeminists, who were accorded a far greater media presence after the attacks. It also invited closet antifeminists within the mainstream media to come out in force, as a "not now, honey, we're at war" mentality made more palatable the airing of buried resentments toward women's demands for equal status.

(pp. 24-26):

The conservative commentariat had an answer and isn't shy about stating it. The problem, according to the opinion makers from Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and many right-wing-financed think tanks who seemed to be on endless rotation on the political talk shows after 9/11, was simple: the baleful feminist influence had turned us into a "nanny state." In the wake of 9/11, a battle needed to be waged between the forces of besieged masculinity and the nursemaids of overweening womanhood -- or, rather, the "vultures" in the "Sisterhood of Grief," as American Spectator's January-February 2002 issue termed them. "When we go soft," Northwestern University psychology professor and American Enterprise scholar David Gutmann warned, "there are still plenty of 'hard' peoples -- the Nazis and Japanese in World War II, the radical Islamists now -- who will see us as decadent sybarites, and who will exploit, through war, our perceived weaknesses." And why had our spine turned to rubber? The conservative analysis proffered an answer: the femocracy.

"Our culture has undergone a process that one observer has aptly termed 'debellicization,'" former drug czar William Bennett advised in Why We Fight, his 2002 call to arms against the domestic forces that were weakening our "resolve." The "debellicizers" that he identified were, over and over, women -- a female army of schoolteachers, psychologists, professors, journalists, authors, and, especially, feminists who taught "that male aggression is a wild and malignant force that needs to be repressed or medicated lest it burst out, as it is always on the verge of doing, in murderous behavior." Since the sixties and seventies, Bennett wrote, this purse-lipped army had denounced American manhood as "a sort of deranged Wild West machismo"; it had derided the Boy Scouts "as irrelevant, 'patriarchal,' and bigoted"; it had infected "generations of American children" with "the principle that violence is always wrong." And with the terrorist attack on our nation, the chicken hawks had come home to roost. "Having been softened up, we might not be able to sustain collective momentum in what we were now being called upon to do," Bennett wrote. "We have been caught with our defenses down."

What's happening now is not pacifism but passivism," National Review's Mark Steyn maintained soon after the attack in an article titled "Fight Now, Love Later: The Awfulness of an Oprahesque Response." "Passivism was a pathogen that had invaded the body politic -- and American women were its Typhoid Marys, American men its victims. The women who ruled our culture had induced "a terrible inertia filled with feel-good platitudes that absolve us from action," Steyn wrote. He found particularly telling Oprah Winfrey's call, at a post-9/11 prayer service in Yankee Stadium, to "love" one another. "Not right now, Opran," he instructed. If we were to prevail in the coming war, the nation first needed to unseat this regiment of "grief counselors" and silence all their "drooling about 'healing' and 'closure.'" "You can't begin 'healing' until the guys have stopped firing."

As if feminizing our domestic culture weren't bad enough, the women's movement was also jeopardizing our readiness on the battlefield. "Bands of brothers don't need girls," a Rocky Mountain News columnist held, denouncing feminists for depleting the military muscle we would need for the upcoming war on terror. "To them, the military is just another symbol of the male patriarchy that ought to be feminized, anyway, along with the rest of society." Our first lady of antifeminism, Ann Coulter, cast this argument in her usual vituperous fashion. "This is right where you want to be after Sept. 11 -- complaining about guns and patriarchy," she addressed feminists in a column titled "Women We'd Like to See . . . in Burkas." "If you didn't already realize how absurd it is to defang men, a surprise attack on U.S. soil is a good reminder. . . . Blather about male patriarchy and phallic guns suddenly sounds as brilliantly prescient as assurances that the Fuhrer would stop at Czechoslovakia."

I had to look up "debellicization." The closest I came to a definition, attributed to British historian Sir Michael Howard, was "the unwillingness to consider war as a legitimate option under any circumstances." Sounds like a good thing to me.

(pp. 27-32):

The few feminist -- or even perceived-to-be feminist -- pundits that managed to find a forum in this cacophony received a less than congenial reception. "I wanted to walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman's apartment, grab her by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and force her to say that to the firefighters," New York Post columnist Rod Dreher ranted on September 20, 2001. The object of his venom was Susan Sontag and the less than five hundred words she had famously contributed to the New Yorker on the subject of 9/11. What was so "despicable"? Was it her suggestion that "a few shreds of historical awareness might help us to understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen"? Or perhaps it was her weariness over the muscle-flexing mantras: "Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be." Dreher was too busy seething to specify his objections. In any case, he was not alone in his overheated fury. The New Republic ranked Sontag with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan called her an "ally of evil" and "deranged." Yet another New York Post columnist, John Podhoretz, said she suffered from "moral idiocy." National Review's Jay Nordlinger accused her of having "always hated America and the West and freedom and democratic goodness." In an article titled "Blame America at Your Peril," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter charged the "haughty" Sontag with dressing the nation in girl's clothes. It was "ironic," he wrote, that "the same people urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it." [ . . . ]

But the stoning of Sontag went on and on. More than a year after the offending issue of the New Yorker had departed the newsstands, former New York mayor Ed Koch was inveighing against her. "Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell," he declared in a radio address in December 2002. "I will no longer read her works."

Anyone who has followed the commentaries of feminist writer Katha Pollitt in the Nation knows she can stir the pot. But pot stirring hardly describes her subdued and almost mournful October 8, 2001, column, in which she related her discussion with her thirteen-year-old daughter about whether to fly an American flag from their apartment window. Pollitt pointed out the flag's historic use as a symbol of "jingoism and vengeance and war"; her daughter said she was wrong, that the flag "means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism." Pollitt agreed that, sadly, "The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now." She closed by lamenting the lack of "symbolic representations right now for the things the world really needs -- equality and justice and humanity and solidarity and intelligence."

These words unleashed a torrent of wrath. Pollitt noted with some amazement that she had received more hostile responses to that column "than on anything I've ever written." The harangue came from across the political media spectrum, from Dissent to the Washington Post to the Washington Times. She was called a bad mother, charged with, variously, "lunacy," "ignorance," "idiocy," "facile insipidities," and designated one of the "chattering asses." The Chicago Sun-Times excerpted a few lines of her piece under the headline "Oh, Shut Up." "We're at war, sweetheart," a column in the New York Post instructed her. "Pollitt, honey, it's time to take your brain to the dry cleaners." Both the Weekly Standard and the New York Post published her address so readers could inundate her daughter with flags. During a radio interview on an NPR talk show, Katha Pollitt was taken aback when Andrew Sullivan accused her of supporting the Taliban and then, in an almost verbatim repeat of the Newsweek commentator's attack on Sontag, likened her, she recalled, "to someone who refuses to help a rape victim and blames her for wearing a short skirt."

In the midst of the fracas, Pollitt came home one day to a message on her answering machine. "You should just go back to Afghanistan, you bitch," a male voice said. Pollitt played the tape for her daughter. "And a little later," Pollitt recalled, "she came to me and said, 'You know, I think you might have been right about the flag.'"

The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was similarly bewildered by the fierce response to two op-ed pieces she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times -- in which she appealed to "our capacity of mercy" and proposed that one of "a hundred ways to be a good citizen" was to learn "honest truths from wrongful deaths." Two weeks later she reported that "I've already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naïve, liberal, peacenik, whiner. . . . Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country, to anywhere." The Los Angeles Times received a letter from a collection agency owner who called Kingsolver's essay "nothing less than another act of terror" and "pure sedition"; he promised to subject Kingsolver to "the most massive personal and business investigation ever conducted on an individual" and to send the results to the FBI, because "this little horror of a human being" needed to be "surveiled."

Things only got worse after the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by writer Gregg Easterbrook claiming Kingsolver had said the American flag stood for "bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder." (She had actually said the exact opposite, that the flag shouldn't stand for these things.) The story was accompanied by a cartoon of a wild-haired figure on a soapbox wearing an "I [Heart] Osama" T-shirt. The misquote was picked up in scores of publications, including Stars and Stripes. "It became the most quoted thing I ever said," Kingsolver told me, "and I didn't say it." The New Republic put her on "Idiocy Watch"; the Chicago Sun-Times denounced her "vicious and unpatriotic drivel" and "hatred of America"; the National Review called her "hysterical," "moronic," and, more obscurely, "Miss Metternich," and even the alternative paper, the Tucson Weekly, in the town where Kingsolver had lived for a quarter century, sneered with the headline "The Bean Trees Must've Fallen on Her Head." Kingsolver's family received threatening mail; a trustee at Kingsolver's alma mater sought to revoke her honorary degree; invitations, both social and professional, were retracted; and readers shipped back copies of her books "with notes saying, 'I don't want this trash in my house,'" Kingsolver recalled. Her efforts to correct the record were spurned. After Kingsolver's attorney wrote the Wall Street Journal to protest the mangling of her words, a dismissive letter arrived from the newspaper's associate general counsel, Stuart D. Karle, who deemed the article "a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Ms. Kingsolver's text." He added strangely that Kingsolver seemed to believe the flag's stars should now symbolize not the fifty states but "entertainers of the moment" like Julia Roberts and Britney Spears. No retraction was forthcoming.

The scenario repeated whenever a feminist-minded writer dared challenge the party line. Epithets were hurled at novelist Arundhati Roy ("repulsive," "foaming-at-the-mouth," "ungracious operator") -- for pointing out pertinent historical facts about America's role in the mujaheddin's rise and for suggesting that "it will be a pity if, instead of using this as a opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own." Columnist Naomi Klein was deemed traitorous -- for suggesting that an international response to terrorism might be more effective than a unilateral one. (William Bennett claimed she was "taking from us" our "right to self-defense.") Humorist Fran Lebowitz was denounced as "disloyal" on an MSNBC talk show -- for finding humor in Bush's shoot-'em-up rhetoric. Female journalists who so much as reported on the treatment of these women were roughed up, too. While researching a story on the post-9/11 attacks on dissenters, Vanity Fair columnist Leslie Bennetts made the mistake of phoning the New York Post's John Podhoretz. She asked him if he had any regrets about accusing Sontag of "moral idiocy." He didn't. After a few brief questions, she rang off. Two days later, Bennetts opened the Post to find Podhoretz had devoted his latest column to an attack on her. "I was getting this for simply raising these issues," Bennetts marveled. [ . . . ]

Some weeks into these media drubbings, Barbara Kingsolver picked up Newsweek and came across Jonathan Alter's article "Blame America at Your Peril," which singled out her, Susan Sontag, and Arundhati Roy for yet another round of reprimand and ridicule. "And I understood when I read that piece that Arundhati and Susan and I were the bad girls who had been mounted on poles for public whipping," she told me. "They whipped us with words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly." At first, the patronizing tone made Kingsolver think that the detractors regarded her and the other women as children. "But if we were so silly and moronic, why was it so important to bring us up and attack us again and again and again? The response was not the response you would expect toward a child. It was more like we were witches."

That was a long quote, but I find this verbal thuggery -- not to mention the old-fashioned kind -- so appalling. Faludi argues that male war critics weren't treated as badly, but only offers Bill Maher as a case contrasting to Sontag (both questioned describing the 9/11 hijackers as cowards). Still, she's probably right. For one thing it may have been easier to marginalize male critics like Noam Chomsky. For another, a lot of male leftists got the war bug, and not just dubious egomaniacs like Christopher Hitchens. (Robert Christgau was one that I was particularly close to. I was in New York working with him on his website when 9/11 happened, and we argued about it the whole time. On the other hand, some feminists got the war bug too: Ellen Willis was a case in point.) Despite the right-wing rants, one reason feminism has faded over the last few decades is that a lot of it has become mainstream common sense -- especially the economics, since without women's careers the whole American economy would be in the toilet. The feminist critique of war is less settled, but it may well have gotten the hawks more nervous than anything else. The very first thing that happened after 9/11, even before the military started plotting and maneuvering, was a massive propaganda campaign against any possible force or rationale that might get in the way of waging war. The above quote gives a good indication of just how desperate and how vicious that propaganda campaign was. We went to war because we couldn't conceive of any other path, not least because we were repeatedly told that any other path was inconceivable.

(pp. 39-41):

One feminist issue, at least, was deemed useful to the Bush White House: the repression of Afghan women. After months of being snubbed, the Feminist Majority Foundation, which had been trying to call attention to the Taliban's abuse of women since 1996, found itself in the astonishing position of playing belle of the capital ball. As did many other feminist groups. At the White House (which had just recently abolished the Office for Women's Initiatives), director of public liaison Lezlee Westine began contacting women's rights organizations and asking them to seek "common ground" with the administration that had iced them since its inception. "Let's really analyze where we can come together," she urged. Martha Burk of the National Council of Women's Organizations received three or four summonses to the White House and, for a while, was fielding calls from administration officials almost once a week.

Feminist leaders were invited to brief, among others, Karen Hughes, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and a bevy of top State Department officials. "They were anxious to meet with us," Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, told me. "In fact, they apologized" for not having met sooner -- and even for not having more women on staff. Both houses of Congress held hearings on women's status in Afghanistan -- in which they enthusiastically applauded Smeal's appeal to "make sure that women are at the table" and "not treated as a side issue." And the White House held a "women's-only" conference call with members of Congress on the situation of Afghan women.

The feminist message seemed to be adopted. "The central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women," Bush pronounced before an audience of women's rights activists as he signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act on December 12, 2001. Laura Bush gave the first First Lady presidential radio address "to kick off a world-wide effort," as she put it, "to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban." Colin Powell announced that "the rights of the women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable," and his State Department issued with much fanfare a "Report on the Taliban's War against Women," adorned with quotes from Afghan women detailing their oppression and even a poem from anthropologist and activist Zieba Shorish-Shamley's Look into My World. [ . . . ]

And then it stopped. As soon as the bombs began dropping over Afghanistan in early October 2001, the White House claims of concern for women's rights came to a halt.

(pp. 44-45):

A couple of years later, the administration was again claiming to come to the defense of women's rights -- this time in Iraq. The State Department unveiled the Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative, a grant program "to help women become full and vibrant partners in Iraq's developing democracy." That this pledge was less than heartfelt might be deduced from the announcement made that same day, identifying one of the first grant recipients: the antifeminist Independent Women's Forum. Once more, the narrative of female captives and male saviors prevailed over the lip service to female independence. Once more, a nation became the metaphor for the girl. As the December 17, 2001, cover of National Review cast it early on, Iraq was a violated country "in need of rescue from its regime." Bush spoke incessantly of avenging Hussein's "rape rooms" but rarely of safe-guarding Iraqi women's status as one of the most emancipated female populations in the Muslim world (a status they would soon lose, following the American invasion). In the years to come, the same sex-coded rescue language would be invoked to justify the quagmire. America would never abandon Iraq or any nation, President Bush vowed, that wasn't "capable of defending herself."

(pp. 46-48):

America will need more "heroes," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled told the Armed Forces one day after 9/11, and however reliable his intelligence on matters of actual defense, on this point he proved prescient. The press, for its part, heeded Rumsfeld's pronouncement by nominating him to the role, in the process dressing him up in some curious costumes. National Review's December 31, 2001, cover story featured a drawing of Rumsfeld in Betty Grable pose, beside the headline "The Stud: Don Rumsfeld, America's New Pin-Up." "Reports have it that people gather round to watch Rumsfeld press conferences the way they do Oprah," the story claimed. "Women confide that they have . . . well, un-defense-policy-like thoughts about the secretary of defense." Fox called Rumsfeld a "babe magnet," and People named him one of the "sexiest men alive." Conservative doyenne Midge Decter penned a book-length valentine, Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait, which included beefcake shots of the young "Rumstud" as a bicep-bulging wrestler and a socialite's breathy confession that she kept his photo tacked to her dressing-room wall. "He works standing up at a tall writing table," Decter wrote, "as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down." His secret, she said, was "manliness."

However odd the idolatry, Rumsfeld wasn't alone in receiving the award for best actor in an unconvincing role. His boss also got the treatment. Passing tactfully over the president's initial missing-in-action performance after 9/11, Newsweek assured readers that George Bush was exercising heroic control: "Behind the scenes, aides say, Bush never exhibited anything but serenity, focus and determination," and he was presiding over war-room sessions with "a commander's grip." In the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes declared Bush "a man with a mission," driven by "a calling like that of a fireman who feels called to his work to save people." Barnes's evidence: "He could have taken a less dangerous, better paying job, but he didn't." David Brooks marveled at Bush's "strenuous tone" and likened his speaking style to Teddy Roosevelt's.

The media seemed eager to turn our designated guardians of national security into action toys and superheroes. Long before Bush's own dress-up moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the press was draping him in metaphoric cape and tights and marveling at his "overnight transformation," as if Bush had stepped into a phone booth instead of a plane on 9/11. The president's vows to get the "evildoers" won him media praise because it sounded cartoonish. Wall Street Journal columnist and former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan exulted that she half expected Bush to "tear open his shirt and reveal the big 'S' on his chest." [ . . . ]

A Vanity Fair cover-story essay featured Bush as a flinty cowboy in chief, sporting a Texas-sized presidential belt buckle -- and assigned all the president's men superhero monikers: Dick Cheney was "The Rock," John Ashcroft "The Heat" ("Tough times demand a tough man"), and Tom Ridge "The Protector" ("At six feet three, with a prominent Buzz Lightyear jaw, he certainly has the right appearance for a director of homeland security"). Rumsfeld had "gone to the mat with al-Qaeda, displaying the same matter-of-fact, oddly reassuring ruthlessness." And national security officials Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Stephen Hadley were "almost as battle-scarred." At least at the gym, where Armitage "can bench-press 440 pounds."

(p. 93):

The 9/11 widows who were most singled out and deemed worthy of being "taken care of" fit a particular profile. They weren't ambitious careerists trading commodities on the eighty-fourth floor. They were at home that day tending to the hearth, models of all-American housewifery. New York magazine's one-year anniversary feature on the families of the 9/11 dead chose four widows to showcase: Lori Kane, "a stay-at-home New Jersey mom"; Anna Mojica, "who worked at a bank after high school but gave up the job when Stephanie was born"; Emily Terry, an "Upper West Side mother of three" who "left a job at the International Center of Photography after her first child, Hannah, was born"; and LaChanze Sapp-Gooding, an "actress and mother of two" who was "taking a work break this fall" -- at the suggestion of her male psychiatrist. "I was starting to snap at my babies," Sapp-Gooding confessed to New York.

Rarely entertained was the possibility that employment might be a balm and an emotional lifesaver to the bereaved -- not to mention a source of much-needed income. The women who went back to work after their catastrophic loss, a far more typical arc, rarely made the media cut. The widows the media liked best were the ones who accepted that their "job" now was to devote themselves to their families and the memory of their dead husbands.

(pp. 103-104):

After a while, [Lyz] Glick lost her willingness to stick to the script. "Although it had been flattering to hear President Bush express his personal gratitude for what Jeremy and the other passengers did to 'save' the White House," she recalled, "I knew when he said it that this simply wasn't true." If the plane hadn't crashed, the air force "was preparing to blast my husband and forty other civilians out of the sky," she pointed out. And anyway, she wondered, shouldn't the real question be why there were no efforts made to save her husband and the other passengers of Flight 93? Their plane was the last to be hijacked, yet "for almost an hour [from the time of the first hijacking], while all of this horror unfolded in the skies, nothing consequential was done." She began to say what she really thought. "In interviews, when someone lobbed what they thought was a soft question at me about whether or not I was proud that Jeremy saved the White House, they'd get a big surprise. I'd reply that I wasn't, because he didn't save it." A Dateline interviewer "just about fell out of her chair." The media inquisitors, Glick came to understand, weren't interested in her version of the truth; they were interested in their own fiction, "this wonderful story, a national myth to elevate our grief."

Widows who didn't contribute to the "wonderful story" found themselves dropped from the media dance card. Widows who openly flouted its terms were treated far worse -- they found themselves the objects of widespread censure. This was the lesson learned by one group of women in particular. As the wives of the most vaunted "heroes," the firefighters' widows were at first the most exalted -- "perfect virgins of grief," New York magazine called them. That is, until the day the virgins began throwing off their habits, and -- armed with an average $2 to $3 million in compensation and charity checks -- began to exercise some economic and personal independence. Their private affairs -- what they shopped for, where they chose to live, whom they dated -- attracted public scrutiny and public reproach. It was as if by making their own choices the women had committed a kind of desecration, defaced the very statues erected to their virtuous victimhood. The widows were said to be spending "blood money" on what were invariably referred to as "lavish lifestyles."

Really, it was a form of blood money: it was paid to the survivors to grease the skids in using their tragedy as an excuse for war. Given how much money the war itself was bound to cost -- and really it was unfathomable at that point -- it would have been churlish to start by stiffing the grieving survivors.

One particularly troublesome group of 9/11 widows became known as the Jersey Girls (pp. 109-110):

For months, the Jersey Girls scoured obscure databases, news archives, and government documents. They pieced together a sophisticated timeline of the missteps and mistakes leading to that terrible day. They began to frame questions and demand answers from law enforcement officers and elected officials. They wanted to know: Why did so many government agencies dawdle on 9/11? Why didn't NORAD scramble planes in time to intercept the two other hijacked planes heading for Washington, D.C.? Why wasn't established protocol for dealing with renegade flights followed? Why did the FBI fail to follow up on the many indications of a plot in the works? How did the CIA fail to find the two hijackers who were already on the CIA watch list -- when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and both rented a room from an undercover FBI informant?

(p. 112):

Others were not so pleased. Mayor Giuliani and Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the Jersey Girls they needed to learn to "trust" their government. Before [Kristen] Breitweiser's second round of congressional testimony, she was summoned before two senators and a panel of committee staffers, who insisted on reviewing her remarks beforehand and warned her not to say anything that might be "embarrassing" to the president. The four widows were still calling themselves "girls," but they were regarded as furies by their targets, one of whom (Republican congressman and future CIA director Porter Goss) literally hid when they knocked on his door. These widows, a GOP staff member complained to UPI, "generally seem to get what they want." To the conservative establishment, they were loud-mouthed women who needed to be muzzled, especially after they raised a stink over Bush's reelection campaign commercials, which were using footage of 9/11 carnage to market the president as the nation's protective paterfamilias. In a matter of days, the conservative punditry launched its counteroffensive, calling Breitweiser a self-promoter who "never met a camera or mike or editorial writer she didn't like" and the Jersey Girls "quite insufferable" and "hysterical."

(p. 131):

The image of the homebound wife whose security depended on her spouse had never been extinguished; efforts to bring back the "new traditional" woman had been launched periodically since the rise of modern feminism. But 9/11 seemed to provide the best opportunity yet to bring her out of dormancy -- and the media's first responders rushed to rouse Sleeping Beauty from her slumber.

Soon after 9/11, several polls indicated that Americans -- male and female alike --were responding to the attacks by resolving to spend more time with family and friends. Eighty percent of adults told American Demographics that the attacks "have increased their appreciation for their families" and 69 percent said that family was now a "greater priority." These findings were soon recast as: women want to quit their jobs and go home.

(p. 140):

In the "Leaders" section of its 9/11 commemorative issue -- whose cover was illustrated with a little blond girl on her father's shoulders, waving an American flag -- Newsweek repeated the theme. The leaders were all men, though the section did include a sidebar to leader Bush on his wife, Laura. "The Chief Caretaker," who "has emerged as a very public caretaker in chief -- not only to her husband but to the whole nation." Her leadership was confined to maternal ministrations at home: "A touch to the back of [her husband's] neck and he visibly relaxes." On 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl praised the First Lady for her "very calming effect on the president." But the nation, too, was supposedly relaxing under Nurse Laura's "calming" touch as she made the talk show rounds, assuring viewers that her husband would keep them "safe" and dispensing tips on how to comfort kids. [ . . . ]

Laura Bush was a prominent woman without career ambition -- the "anti-Hillary," as she was repeatedly called -- but what the return-to-nesting trend required even more was the example of a prominent woman who had such ambition and was now renouncing it. By April 2002, the media had one: the president's trusted adviser, Karen Hughes, announced that she was returning to Texas to spend more time with her family. The media cheerleading commenced at once: "Count Karen Hughes among the brave leaders of that radical redirection," "More power to her," "Hats off to Hughes. . . . Karen, you're making a decision you will never regret. You go, girl!" Hughes's decision was "wise," "unselfish," and "so courageous and worthy of plaudits." The op-ed headlines exhorted women to follow her lead: "It's Sometimes Good to Take a Step Back," "There's No One Like Mom for the Home," and "Hughes Quits for Something Even Better." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wondered if Hughes's retirement was "the coup de grace for Have It All," and the networks ran segments using Hughes's decision as a cautionary tale to professional women.

(pp. 150-152):

Guns have always played an emblematic role in American public life, but the firearms preoccupations of the 2004 presidential race went far beyond previous political seasons. "It's remarkable how the gun issue is playing this year," a CNN political report noted as early as December 2003, observing that Democratic candidates were now acting as if gun control were "some sort of virus" and even Howard Dean was bragging about his "high marks" from the National Rifle Association. [ . . . ]

When the candidates picked up their guns, they weren't just stalking the flannel-jacket set; they were hunting the vote of haunted America, a nation vulnerable to the enticements of protection fantasies. A Kerry campaign brochure spelled out the underlying agenda with a photograph of the candidate holding a shotgun, titled "John Kerry Will Defend Ohio." And, the promise implied, the forty-nine other states. Kerry devoted an inordinate amount of his campaign to peddling his coonskin-cap credentials. On a swing through the Midwest in July 2004, Kerry stopped to brandish a 12-gauge at the Gunslick Trap Club in Holmen, Wisconsin, before hurrying on to La Crosse, where he had the campaign bus pull over so he could demonstrate his shooting prowess at a clay pigeon skeet range. The following day, he stopped to expound on his deer hunting techniques with a group of midwestern journalists. "I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach," Kerry told them. "I track and move and decoy and play games and try to outsmart them. You know, I kind of play the wind. That's hunting." [ . . . ]

As soon as hunting season opened, a camo-covered Kerry could be found in one frost-laden duck blind after another. Bleary-eyed journalists rose before dawn to follow him. There was the pheasant hunt in Iowa (where Kerry inspected the neck of his fresh kill before a phalanx of photographers), the goose hunt in Ohio (where Kerry emerged from a cornfield with a hand "stained with goose blood" but empty of an actual carcass), and another clay pigeon huntin Wisconsin (no blood, but the candidate reportedly plugged seventeen of his twenty-five marks). At a campaign appearance in West Virginia, Kerry hoisted a shotgun onstage and told an audience of miners that he'd like to go "gobble-huntin'." In Pike County, Ohio, Kerry dropped in on the Buchanan Village Gun Shop to inquire, in freshly acquired twang, "Can I get me a hunting license here?" It was a moment that inspired a National Review columnist to invoke the sodomy scene in Deliverance: "what will Kerry say if he goes on the campaign trail into deepest Appalachia? 'Squeal like a pig?'"

For those who couldn't make Kerry's early-morning shoot-'em-ups, the campaign's Web site posted photographs of the candidate pursuing his prey and admiring the gory results; and before public appearances, his advance teams distributed 8 × 10 glossies of the senator in full hunting finery, clutching his "trusty" shotgun. Eventually, a "right to own firearms" plank was even added to the Democratic Party platform, for the first time ever.

Kerry's camo cameos succeeded mostly in provoking the deep-pocketed ire of the National Rifle Association, which spent $20 million denouncing him during the campaign. "John Kerry's not a hunter," its thirty-minute television infomercial sneered. "He just plays one on TV," Vice President Dick Cheney, who delivered the keynote address at the NRA convention that year, made a point of noting that Kerry's camo jacket looked suspiciously "new." Bush ridiculed Kerry's sartorial strategy on campaign stops, albeit muffing his own joke, as he did in Hershey, Pennsylvania. "He can run," the president said, "he can even hide in camo, but he can't hide."

Now Cheney, there's a hunter!

(pp. 159-160):

The Bush campaign's "W Stands for Women" initiative was based on that premise. Frontloaded with female volunteers and merchandised with pink baseball caps for sale on the WStandsforWomen Web site, the effort launched in May 2004 -- timed to coincide, of course, with Mother's Day. Mindy Tucker Fletcher, cochair of the W Stands for Women national steering committee, told the press that for the security mom the election would come down to one question: who would she want to protect her "if September 11 happened again?" Top answer that question, the W promoters offered up two such mothers who were all in the family -- literally. "You know, I'm a security mom," Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Elizabeth told CNN. "I've got four little kids. And what I care about in this election cycle is electing a guy who is going to be a commander in chief, who will do whatever it takes to keep those kids safe." The second was Laura Bush, who quickly attained status as the Mother of All Security Moms. On the afternoon talk shows, in ads on the Web sites of women's magazines like Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle, and, ultimately, from the dais of the Republican National Convention, she assured American mothers of "George's work to protect our country and defeat terror so that all children can grow up in a more peaceful world."

Predictably, the conservative female punditry fell into line. According to Kay Daly, a commentator and a lobbyist for Bush's federal judicial nominees, American housewives across the nation were quavering in their kitchens. [ . . . ]

In USA Today, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin pointed to herself as proof of the phenomenon: "I am what this year's election pollsters call a 'security mom.' . . . Nothing matters more to me right now than the safety of my home and the survival of my homeland." Children, she implied, were among the main targets of the 9/11 attacks. "Security moms will never forget that toddlers and schoolchildren were incinerated in the hijacked planes on Sept. 11," she wrote. (Among the 2,973 victims were eight children, all on planes.) "Murderous Islamic fanatics will stop at nothing to do the same to our kids." And a Democratic president -- or a compassionate Republican -- would only encourage them. "As they plot our death and destruction, these enemies will not be won over by either hair-sprayed liberalism or bleeding-heart conservatism."

(pp. 162-163):

Kerry and his advisers were engrossed in the same myth reenactment as the Bush administration. They were counting on the senator's decorated service in Vietnam to qualify him for the role, especially when contrasted with Bush's AWOL record. But they were missing the female part of the myth's equation. Having adopted the "reporting for duty" protective mantle, the Kerry campaign only belatedly went looking for women to protect. To that end, Kerry strategist Mike McCurry announced in the fall of 2004 that the candidate would be adjusting his "tonal quality" and seeking "softer" approaches, which mostly meant dispatching Kerry to media venues where security moms might be found. The candidate made the rounds of Dr. Phil and Live with Regis and Kelly and appeared at an event sponsored by Redbook. "No American mother should have to lie awake at night wondering whether her children will be safe at school," Kerry pronounced in a Philadelphia stump speech in September, seizing upon the Beslan school hostage crisis as an eleventh-hour opportunity to position himself as America's guardian father. "When we look at the images of children brutalized by remorseless terrorists in Russia, we know that this is not just a political or military struggle -- it goes to the very heart of what we value most -- our families. It strikes at the bond between a mother and child." As president, he said, he would regard it as "my sacred duty" to be able to say "I am doing everything in my power to keep your children safe."

Next chapter is "Precious Little Jessi": the Jessica Lynch story. I didn't mark any quotes, but it's a good account, a prime example of Faludi's argument that the terror dream built on the old model of male heroes rescuing female victims, and tried to force everything they could into that model. Part Two of the book, "Phylogeny," goes back through the long history of captivity narratives -- stories of white American women being captured by Indians, hopefully to be rescued by valiant white American men. (The John Wayne movie, The Searchers, featured in Chuck Workman's propaganda reel, was just such a story.) Chapter starts (p. 165):

I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, billed as the book that finally "lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq war in her own words," debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list in November 2003. One of the readers curious to learn its contents was the subject herself. In a Time cover story that accompanied the book's release, Lynch told the reporter that she had taken a look at it but "skipped the parts" that might upset her. If this seemed like a peculiarly arm's length relationship to one's own memoir, Lynch had her reasons. "The Jessica Lynch Story" wasn't hers -- and hadn't been since the day eight months earlier when the nineteen-year-old private and fellow soldiers in the army's 507th Ordinance Maintenance Company had been ambushed on the outskirts of a desert town. Eleven of her thirty-three comrades -- chefs, mechanics, requisition and supply clerks -- died, five were held hostage for three weeks in a succession of houses, and Lynch, severely injured in an ensuing car wreck that knocked her unconscious for three hours, work to find herself in a Nasiriyah hospital room, where she remained for nine days.

Part Two reviews the history of captivity narratives, starting with the original story that was mythologized in The Searchers. (pp. 199-200):

"Why in this country is all the attention paid to just one young girl?" Diane Sawyer wondered out loud, partway through her Primetime special on Jessica Lynch. It was a profound question, likely more than she knew. In a sense, it distilled all the other questions that swirled around the strangeness of our response to 9/11. Questions like: Why was the attack reconceived as a threat tot he American home and family? Why were independent female voices censured and a bugle call sounded to return to Betty Crocker domesticity? Why were our political and cultural stages suddenly packed with Lone Ranger leaders, Davy Crockett candidates, and John Wayne "manly men"? Why, in short, when confronted with an actual danger, did America call rewrite?

Each rewrite required a girl in jep, whether a literal feminine dependent or a metaphorical minor in the form of a tremulous security mom. Without the girl, the cowboy president had no one to hug, the buckskin pol no one to protect, the urban outrider no one to rescue. In the resurrection drama of American might, this supporting actress was the essential dramatis persona, without whom the play could not go on.

(p. 208):

We perceive our country as inviolable, shielded from enemy penetration. Indeed, in recent history the United States has been, among nations, one of the most immune to attack on its home soil. And yet, our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation, complying with no accepted Western rules of engagement and subscribing to an alien culture, who attacked white America on its "own" soil and against civilian targets. September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an "unthinkable" occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else. It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats. Our ancestors had already fought a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since.

Introduces the account of Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife, captured by Indians during King Philip's War in 1675; she went on to write a book about her captivity, the first bestseller in American history (pp. 209-211):

The attack by five hundred Narragansetts came five months into King Philip's War (or Metacom's Rebellion, for those who preferred the Wampanoag chief's non-British appellation), the fearsome confrontation between white settlers and the New England tribes that would stand as "the great crisis" of Puritan America, presaging so many other traumas in early America. To this day King Philip's War remains, per capita, America's deadliest war: in the yearlong conflict, one in every ten white men of military age in Massachusetts Bay died; one of every sixteen in the northeastern colonies. Two-thirds of the New England towns were attacked, more than half the settlements were left in ruins, and the settlers were forced to retreat nearly to the coast; the war decimated the colonial economy, bankrupted its government treasuries, and brought the entire Puritan project to the edge of annihilation. [ . . . ]

These "barbarous inhumane Outrages," Ipswich minister William Hubbard wrote in his account of King Philip's War in 1676, "no more deserve the Name of a War than the Report of them the Title of an History." He could call them only the "troubles." The colonial leadership, of course, was hardly blameless -- its offenses had been instrumental in provoking the war, to which it contributed its own inhumane outrages -- and the devastation inflicted on the Indian communities by the conflict was far worse.* [Footnote: Most famous of those outrages was the Great Swamp Fight, two months before the Narragansett attack on Rowlandson's town, in which English soldiers slaughtered and burned alive six hundred Narragansetts in their winter retreat in Rhode Island, about half of them women and children.] But such realities, which were instantly repressed anyway, could not mitigate the settlers' trauma. Like the "different kind of war" that Bush heralded before Congress on September 21, 2001, the "troubles" seemed to have no limits, no battlefield conventions, no stopping point. The bitterness unleashed in both camps by Metacom's Rebellion, a war in which no treaty was ever signed, foreclosed the possibility of peaceful relations between native and white Americans for all time and unleashed a harrowing series of conflicts -- King William's War, Queen Anne's War, King George's War, the French and Indian War -- that dragged into the next century.

Caught in these coils, early American settlers dwelled in a state of perpetual insecurity, in what they repeatedly described as an experience of "terror." Time and again, military attempts to guard frontier towns failed. Long after King Philip himself had been shot, quartered, and beheaded, long after his head was impaled on a pole and displayed in Plymouth's town square (where his father had dined with Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving) for the delectation of white passersby for the next quarter century; and long after Cotton Mather, that famous scion of the dynastic Puritan ministry, broke off what remained of the putrefied jaw "from the Blasphemous exposed Skull of that Leviathan" and pocketed it (as if, historian Jill Lepore observed, to "shut Philip up"), the different kind of war roiled on, in the borderlands of the continent and the bitter hearts of its antagonists.

(pp. 212-213):

The specter of the white maiden taken against her will by dark "savages" became our recurring trope, riveting the American imagination from Jane McCrea's Revolutionary-era seizure and death at the hands of British-allied Algonquins to the fictional Alice and Cora Munro's Indian immurement in The Last of the Mohicans to Patty Hearst's kidnapping (and alleged rape) by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army helmed by escaped black convict "Field Marshal Cinque." That maiden's rescue, fantasized or real, became our reigning redemption tale. Many scholars of American culture see our national preoccupation with female rescue as mere cover story, a pretext employed to justify the sanguinary pleasure our pioneers took in the slaughter of the continent's natives and the decimation of the wilderness. That is: first we conquered, then we made up a fiction of defiled womanhood to rationalize it. The ethic implicit in that fiction "demands that the wilderness be destroyed so that it can be made safe for the white woman and civilization she represents," Richard Slotkin wrote in Regeneration through Violence, his magisterial 1973 exploration of the frontier myth's development. But what if the reverse is also true? What if the unbounded appetite for conquest derives not only from our long relish for the kill but from our even longer sense of disgrace on the receiving end of assault -- assaults to our women in our own settlements and in our own homes? What if the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror wasn't the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal?

(pp. 231-232):

Norton's 2002 work, In the Devil's Share, an important reassessment of the Salem witch trials, demonstrated the relatedness of twin events: Indian attack with witch hunt, a war on terror with a sexually inflected hysteria. In 1690, the colonial militias suffered a series of humiliating defeats by the native populations and were forced to withdraw once more from the borderlands. Two years later in Salem, a community especially besieged by refugees from the frontier, 185 people, three-fourths of whom were women, were accused of making covenant with Satan in the forest, frequently while in the company of Indian "savages." Nineteen would go to the gallows.

King William's War (or the Second Indian War, as it was also known) did not "cause" the witchcraft crisis all on its own, but, as Norton argued, "the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did." Cotton Mather, the impresario and chronicler extraordinaire of the witch trials, clearly linked the battle against Satan with that against savages. No longer were the Indians the "agents of God" sent for divine chastening; now they were the devil's assistants. Mather wrote:

The Story of the Prodigious War, made by the Spirits of the Invisible World upon the People of New England, in the year, 1692, . . . [has] made me often think, that this inexplicable War might have some of its Original among the Indians, whose Chief Sagamores are well known unto some of our Captives, to have been horrid Sorcerers, and hellish Conjurors such as conversed with daemons.

The witchcraft accusations in Salem came initially and disproportionately from the war's refugees, many of them young girls orphaned or traumatized by the bloody Indian raids on outpost towns. The first accused "witch," Tituba, was herself most likely an Indian (not a black woman from the West Indies, as many historical accounts have previously described her) and, more crucially, was known as an Indian to her contemporaries. Again and again,t he "spectral" sightings of the possessed involved witches who were said to be mingling with Indians in the forest, committing atrocities that echoed those of the Indian raids, and serving a "tawny" devil who always seemed to take an Indian form. Associating colonial defeats in the Indian wars with witchcraft served many purposes, notable among them the elision of another, more worldly explanation. The colonial leaders, including a number of the judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer who prosecuted the witches, were themselves complicit in the Second Indian War's disastrous outcome -- through unpreparedness, avarice, mistaken strategy, or sheer ineptitude. And eager to deflect attention from their own failures and locate the cause of vulnerability elsewhere. "Bay Colony magistrates had good reason to find a witch conspiracy plausible in 1692," Norton wrote, adding with italic emphasis, "It must always be remembered that the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer were the very men who led the colony both politically and militarily."

Several more narratives: Mercy Short, captured during King William's War; and most notoriously Hannah Duston, who effected her own rescue by taking a hatchet to her captors while they slept, killing six women and children, then returning for good measure to take and cash in on their scalps. Then there was Elizabeth Hanson, abducted in 1724; Hannah Dennis; Mercy Harbison; "The Panther Captivity." But what was needed was male rescuers, whence Daniel Boone, who took a little rewriting before he was fit for a statue (p. 256):

This ultimate marbled expression of male heroism -- the Simplicity pattern for every Rudy Giuliani and Donald Rumsfeld to follow -- would come at the tail end of a long metamorphosis. In none of its many mutations along the way to its final perfection did the myth quite reflect the individual on whom it was putatively based. As the man himself protested at one point: "Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related to me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man."

Daniel Boone was raised a Quaker in a Pennsylvania settlement of Friends that had achieved a remarkably affable coexistence with the neighboring Indians. His grandfather distinguished himself with this chivalric act: in 1728, he rescued two Indian girls from violation by white men. Boone himself was no Indian hater: he killed three Indians in his life but took no pleasure in their deaths. Nor was he the vaunted patriot-soldier that he was later made out to be. His contributions tot he Revolutionary cause were limited, and his overly friendly relations with British military officials and their Indian operatives made him a figure of great suspicion in Boonesborough and got him court-martialed for treason (he was eventually cleared). Nor did he hold himself out as a devout partisan of the new republic. At the first offer of land in Spanish Missouri, Boone was happy to abandon his American homeland and relocate.

(p. 262):

The mythic Boone was morphing into a darker male avatar. There wasn't much to distinguish him now from the sanguinary "fiends" of the frontier -- other than his willingness, as Simms had put it, "to rescue beauty from the clutches of the savage." Boone's rescue of Jemima Boone and the two other girls, which Filson described in two sentences, received the better part of a chapter in Flint's book. But even that chivalric moment was not enough. For the "new man" of the West to prove himself more than a degenerate desperado, the vulnerability and need of the weaker sex had to be placed front and center -- and would have to be dire.

What was good for Daniel Boone was good for the country: his coronation as rescuer of captive girls reflected a culture-wide desire to measure national male strength by female peril. Such a formula, when applied in insecure times, would demand that women be saved from more and more gruesome violation to prove their saviors' valor. Ultimately, as with Jessica Lynch, no rescue drama could be sufficient without the specter of rape. The Boone legend would become a proving ground for this ultimate refinement of the American security myth.

(pp. 273-275):

Just as chaste resistance exempted the Victorian "queen" from shame, so any departure from the gender code of conduct risked very real public retribution. When Sarah Wakefield, a Minnesota physician's wife, returned from six weeks in captivity in 1862, she credited a Dakota Sioux Indian, Chaska, with saving her and her infant from certain murder. Chaska was among a contingent of 400 Sioux men who voluntarily returned the 269 captives taken during the Dakota War to the safety of white territory. For their pains, 303 of them were sentenced to death in a kangaroo court. The proceedings before a military commission of dubious authority were absent any binding jurisprudence, defense lawyers, right to cross-examination, or, in many cases, specific charges or real evidence. In this fashion, thirty to forty defendants were tried a day. Writing a century and a half later on the frantic search for case-law precedent to justify the Bush administration's treatment of "illegal enemy combatants," scholar Marouf Hasian Jr. noted ironically that the modern quest had "neglected one of the most pertinent historical parallels to the post-September 11 era": the U.S. military tribunal procedures against the Dakota Sioux Indians in 1862.

Upon her return, Wakefield told army officers that Chaska was "the Indian who had saved me" and recounted "how kind he had been." Her remarks were instantly seen as suspect. She would be the first captive called up for questioning by a military court of inquiry, she was pressed to reveal Indian threats to her sexual purity. "They thought it very strange that I had no complaints to make," she wrote, and "did not appear to believe me." Making no headway, her interrogators urged her to retire to another room to talk to a minister, to whom she might confide "anything more of a private nature." She had nothing to reveal, but Chaska was arrested anyway, and Wakefield soon found herself the object of a vilification campaign by the military. Rumors spread that she was embroiled in an adulterous love affair with Chaska. When she protested, the commanding officer of the Minnesota troops attributed her "hysteria" to entanglement with a "dusky paramour." Witnessing her humiliation, some of the other captive women summoned before the tribunal changed their stories and claimed to have suffered grievously at the hands of their captors. "It shocked me," Wakefield wrote of these sudden spasms of recovered memory. "I do not know of but two females that were abused by the Indians. I often asked the prisoners when we met, for we were hearing all kinds of reports, but they all said they were well treated." She suspected the women of spinning tales "to excite the sympathies of the soldiers."

By the time of the trial, the claims of molestation and rape had been vastly inflated. "The female captives were, with very few exceptions, subjected to the most horrible treatment," testified one man, a white clerk. (More than four hundred men, and four women, spoke before the commission.) "In some cases a woman would be taken into the woods and her person violated by 6, 7, and as many as 10 or 12 of these fiends at one time." The state's newspapers and politicians contributed to the furor; a Minnesota congressman contended that although "these savages" had "sometimes spared the lives of the mothers and daughters, they did so only to take them into a captivity which was infinitely worse than death."

At the trial, Wakefield was one of the few who took the stand on behalf of a defendant, but her testimony that Chaska had "saved [her] life three times," protected her children from harm, and arranged for his mother to hide her from marauders didn't seem to register. Nor did a ruling from President Abraham Lincoln, who personally pardoned 265 of the 303 condemned men. (Linoln also found only two cases that presented any evidence of a Dakota man "violating females.") Chaska's name was on the presidential pardon list. Nonetheless, on December 26, 1862, he was hanged at Mankato, Minnesota, along with thirty-seven other Dakota men, in the largest mass execution in American history. [ . . . ]

Wakefield published her narrative in the hopes that a written testament might finally, if posthumously, clear Chaska's name -- and her own. She would not succeed in either case. The tale of the ravished white women of the Dakota War was the version that would prevail. Wakefield's account would soon be eclipsed by a fictional account, the 1875 Miss Annie Coleson's Own Narrative of Her Captivity among the Sioux Indians. This sentimental fabrication provided the acceptable admixture of brave male defenders, hysterical women, and despoiling Indians. The virginal "Miss Annie" is ultimately rescued by a white woodsman named "Webb," her knight in shining buckskins. "He was dressed in hunting costume which well became his athletic form," the putative Miss Annie reports, "he had a Roman nose, with a fine intelligent countenance and his thick black hair was brushed off his high and expensive forehead." Her hero genteelly addresses her as "madam," assures her he will take care of her henceforth, and -- shades of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards -- scalps her dead captor.

(p. 276):

The American masculine archetype that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century was a detached figure of the frontier, with no wife or possessions besides his gun. He populated the "penny dreadful" cowboy novels that dominated the late Victorian marketplace -- juvenile potboilers with mind-numbing rounds of Wild West shoot-'em-ups and maiden rescues. Only the titles seemed to change: Daredeath Dick, King of the Cowboys; Goldglove Gid, the Man of Grit; Hurricane Hal, the Cowboy Hotspur. The hero of these interchangeable plots was a loner who could handle torture and, when necessary, deliver it. He had one calling above all others: to shield helpless girls from the monster of grown-up male sexuality. Which is to say, the American hero had become a boy engrossed in a prepubescent cartoon fantasy. He would "go backwards, from old age to golden youth," as D. H. Lawrence said in another context, describing the hero trajectory of the Leatherstocking novels. "That," Lawrence concluded, "is the true myth of America." The myth of a secure America, patrolled by vigilant boys and populated by virginal maidens, would attain its full expression in the same years that saw the closing of the American frontier. From 1860 to 1890, the "clearing" of the continent moved to its grand finale. By 1890, vast Indian populations had been wiped out and their remnants consigned to reservations. America had quarantined its remaining illegal enemy combatants and, along with them, centuries-long contagions of shame. Or so it imagined. The myth was now in final form -- and ready to be reactivated whenever a homeland threat might call for its protective services.

(p. 277):

Thousands of black men would be lynched in the years following the Civil War, cresting at the turn of the century and persisting into the 1930s -- and the number one justification offered was rape of white women. Never mind that less than 25 percent of lynching victims had actually been accused of rape or attempted rape (and many of that group were either falsely accused or "guilty" of no more than a consensual relationship or a friendly greeting to a white woman). Never mind that interracial sexual assaults were far more likely to run in the other direction, perpetrated on black women by white men. "By the late nineteenth century," Nancy MacLean wrote in Behind the Mask of Chivalry, "large numbers of white Americans, particularly in the South, believed that black men had acquired an incorrigible desire to rape white women."

(pp. 279-280):

Decades later, the fantasy of the protector male and the helpless female would resurface in modern form. The 1950s witnessed its own terror dream and demonstrated how a myth cemented a century earlier to deflect that horror could operate in a setting very distant from the defeated South and at a great remove from Indian captivity. Though the United States was newly enshrined as a world power, postwar Americans perceived themselves as more vulnerable than ever before, in this instance, precisely because our own inventions -- the atomic bomb, combined with the long-range bomber and the guided missile -- seemed to remove our defensive isolation. The homeland was now susceptible to annihilation from any Communist madman or from the insidious internal forces of fifth-column subversives or even from the genetic mutations induced by invisible penetrating rays. Dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have ended the war, but it left the nation feeling newly endangered. News commentaries and government reports after our attack on Japan fixated on our own anxiety, describing a nationwide mood of "hysteria," "fear psychosis," "primordial apprehensions," a "poisonous fog" of fear, and a "new pitch of terror." The New Republic wondered at the "curious new sense of insecurity, rather incongruous in the face of military victory," and CBS's Edward R. Murrow remarked on his August 12, 1945, broadcast, "Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured."

(pp. 292-294):

On the larger stage of national and international politics, as in New York, the need to pursue concrete concerns would be bartered for ceremonial scrip. In Afghanistan, our fantasies of female rescue actually got in the way of female security. Not only did White House vows to safeguard the rights of Afghan women prove hollow, our woefully inadequate attempts at "reconstruction" only served to make their conditions worse. By 2006, the news was bleak: honor killings were dramatically on the rise (with 185 women and girls killed in the first nine months of the year), about 40 percent of women reported that they had been forced into marriage, about 50 percent had been beaten by their husbands, three hundred girls' schools had been set on fire in the last year and several teachers killed, as little as 3 percent of girls were enrolled in schools in some regions and many had retreated to secret home classes, no women were appointed to the new Afghan cabinet, and the director of the women's affairs ministry in Kandahar had been gunned down in her own front yard.

The pattern would repeat in Iraq, a nation that had made significant progress in advancing women's rights from the sixties to the eighties. Once more, the United States promised heightened security and freedom for Iraqi women, and once more our policies helped accomplish the opposite. By 2005, human rights organizations were reporting a sharp rise in rapes, abductions, and sexual slavery; severe restrictions on womens' ability to travel, go to school, and work; and the return of Sharia law in a U.S.-brokered constitution that also restricted women's reproductive, employment, marital, and inheritance rights. "Misery gangs" roamed the streets, tormenting and beating women who did not dress or behave "properly." In Basra, it became a capital crime for a woman to wear pants or appear in public. By 2005, several women's rights activists and female political leaders, along with one of the three female members of the Iarqi Governing Council, had been murdered, and even Bush's former female supporters in Iraq were in despair. "I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain," wrote Raja Kuzai, an obstetrician and former member of the Iraqi assembly's constitution-drafting committee, who once hailed Bush as "My Liberator." "There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq," she said. "The future is for the clerics."

Our inept intervention in Afghanistan and our disastrous prosecution of the war in Iraq proved devastating to the general population, not only to women and not only in those two countries. The lawlessness we unleashed compromised security around the globe and within our own borders. By living in a myth, we made the world and ourselves less secure. By refusing to grapple with the actual failures that led to 9/11 and by refusing to listen to the people who tried to call attention to those failures, the nation denied its citizenry any real accounting of the missteps that led to catastrophe and any real assurance that we were any better equipped to prevent or repel another terrorist attack.

A conclusion (pp. 295-296):

The question remains. What if the nation had responded to 9/11 differently? What if we hadn't retreated into platitudes and compensatory fictions? What if we had taken the attack as an occasion to "confront the truth?"

We would, of course, have found much to confront, from malfunctioning radios to inept intelligence to impeachable dishonesties reaching to the highest offices of government. But beyond all these particulars a larger deception begs to be met head-on. When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty on "fifth column" feminists -- in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness -- we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction. Our reflexive reaction to 9/11 -- fantastical, weirdly disconnected from the very real emergency at hand -- exposed a counterfeit belief system. It reprised a bogus security drill that divided men from women and mobilized them to the defense of a myth instead of the defense of a country. That is why, summoned by an hour of danger to unity of purpose, we clung to the fallacy that only a house divided against itself can stand. That self-delusion, so deeply ingrained in our history, so heavily defended by our culture, calls out for refutation.

We live at a moment of great possibility. By returning us to the original trauma that produced our national myth, the attacks on 9/11 present us with a historic watershed: faced with a replay of our formative experience, we have the opportunity to resolve the old story in a new way that honors the country and its citizens. We never really lacked that capacity. We just buried it under a fantasy. September 11 offers us, even now, the chance to revisit that past and reverse that long denial, to imagine a national identity grounded not on virile illusions but on the talents and vitality of all of us equally, men and women both.

posted 2008-07-03